Tube Preamps Should Have This Feature

I have found the warm up time required to sound the very best is highly dependent on the make and model. For instance the Audio Research Reference 5 and SE had a very distinct ~ 10 - 12 minute warm up sound improvement… but a signal going through it was required! It was very distinctive… you could turn it on for an hour but the sound improvement happened ten minutes after a signal got sent through it. I thought I was nuts, so I got on a forum… and I was surprised to find detailed discussions about this exact behavior.

Now with the ARC Ref6se… no notable change from the moment the one and a half minute internal warm up and the auto mute comes off.

Other equipment has been different. But an individual piece tends to be completely repeatable.

To my needs experience,  solid state stuff needs much more warm up time than tubes stuff which sound already fine after a few minutes of warm up.

Agree, In my limited experience SS requires longer warm-up time to sound best. 

I turn my Avatar on once a day and turn it off once a day, with rare exceptions. I don't like burning tubes for nothing but it appears that I do it. I feel better about this than about multiple on/offs a day. Terrible for ecology, I know, but I compensate with other things.

I just leave my tube preamp and tube DAC on all the time, unless I'm away for more than a day or during thunderstorms. I have no problem with tube life.

@invalid 

Definitely that can be true. But is somewhat dependent on the specific equipment. 

I suspect both your pieces of equipment have solid state power supplies and tube amplification. Tube power supply life tends to be much shorter than the main circuit tube life. Many older preamps had tube life over 10,000 hours, they never had tubed power supplies.